Chapter 4 Tribal People 119convey the Miao worldview or its social organization—that is, Miao culture as
it was lived by the Miao people themselves. The main effort was on classifying
the various kinds of Miao, often on the basis of characteristics of Miao
women’s clothing (Blue, White, Flowery, Black, Red, etc.), using categories the
Miao themselves use to describe their own subgroups. As a result of this
approach, their divisions and subdivisions across a number of provinces bal-
looned into the hundreds.
Things changed after the Communist revolution. With a theory of cultural
evolution based on Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, the People’s Repub-
lic authorized an immense effort of scientific research that would identify the
“nationalities” of China (using the Chinese form, minzu, of the Russian nation-
alnosti) and rank them on a scale from primitive to slave to feudal to capitalist
to socialist. Ironically, communal land use qualified a person as primitive, not
socialist, if the person was not a collectivized Han farmer. The great diversity
of the Miao that had perplexed social scientists in the first half of the century
was now collapsed in a theory that all Miao were part of one ancient ethnic
category and that any regional differences that appeared among them were
recent divergences from an ancient common pattern. This view takes it as set-
tled truth that their original homeland was somewhere between the Yellow
River and the Yangzi River, from where they wandered south and west to their
present locations.
Miao women in Fenghuang, China, wearing silver headgear for a local festival. The
Miao in China are now an official “nationality” whose more colorful customs are
encouraged, although they are still considered inadequately modernized.